Rhonda Roland Shearer has recently pointed out that at least the second version of the Roue
de Bicyclette, created in 1916 in New York, is statically an extremely
fragile object. Could, Roland Shearer ponders, the combination of front-wheel
fork, rim and a stool be "an experiment and schematic diagram of
chance". (1)
Duchamp himself, during his lifetime, never ceased to stress, with ostentatious
calm and persistence, the incidentalness and the insignificance of his
invention trouvé. Even though today the Bicycle Wheel
is regarded as one of the central incunabula of the ready-made-idea,
we now know that originally it had little in common with the future
ready-made (2).
According to Duchamp, the 1913 original as well as the 1916 version
of it were rather intended to please him personally, to be "the
'gadget' for an artist in his studio(3)."
One of the statements used by Duchamp in several interviews is to be
remembered in this connection - in the version that was handed down
to us by Arturo Schwarz: "To set the wheel turning was very soothing,
very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material
life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my
studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames
dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio,
the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of the flames
(4)."
Clearly, the analogy to an open fire was not chosen arbitrarily. Duchamp,
with the flames dancing in the fireplace, found an easily intelligible
analogon for the 'contemplative' effect that the spinning spoke wheel
was supposed to have on him, at the time the first and only beholder
and user - regardless of whether he had taken delight in the spokes'
'optical flicker' or in the object's supposed instability, provoked
by the centrifugal forces acting upon it. Whether the spinning of the
rim was "very soothing, very comforting(5)"
or rather, as Roland Shearer assumes, "hardly relaxing(6)"
it was originally part of the idea of the Bicycle Wheel.

Should it not then be allowed, one may well ask now, to set the wheel turning even today,
following Duchamp's instruction and thus to a large extent keeping the
original idea alive? This, of course, strikes one as being quite a theoretical
question, given the museum reality. Whoever encounters one of the Bicycle
Wheel's replicas in a public collection today, be it in Cologne,
Paris, Philadelphia, New York, Stockholm or elsewhere, is confronted
with tabooing prohibition signs, exposing plinths and reprimanding museum
attendants. This confirms not only the museum's inherent paradoxical
logic of making history an actual experience by means of preserving
it, but also the shift of meaning the idea of the Bicycle Wheel
has been through in the course of the decades.

Sidney Janis has the dubious honour of having introduced a first replica, namely the third
version of the Roue de Bicyclette, into the context of an exhibition
for the first time. He did so on the occasion of the "Climax in XXth
Century Art"-exhibition early in 1951, thereby changing the object's
intellectual status as well as the meaning and the function ascribed to
it. The former "gadget" was de facto declared a designated ready-made
within the canon of Duchamp's works. The artist himself had carried out
the arrangement of the exhibits and had dated as well as signed and thus
authenticated and authorized the replica of the Bicycle Wheel in
the beginning of 1951.(7)

Click to enlarge

View of the Duchamp gallery, "The Art of Assemblage" (October 2 - November 12, 1961), The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Some years later, in the autumn of 1961, the same Janis-replica was displayed in the legendary
exhibition "The Art of Assemblage" in the Museum of Modern Art,
once more and unquestionably so within the context of the ready-made.
The Bicycle Wheel, having been given the status of a museum piece,
was transformed into a state of visually documenting the concept of the
ready-made, which was regarded as being historical (8).
It was no longer necessary to set the wheel turning in order to be delighted
by it; on the contrary, this was prohibited, as the American photographer
Marvin Lazarus reported on the occasion of a photo shooting with Duchamp
in the exhibition on 10 November 1961: "I wanted to move the Roue
de Bicyclette so that I could shoot through it. Duchamp moved it.
[...] the guard [...] ran over to me and asked if I had moved the object.
Before I could answer, with a little smile, Duchamp said quietly, 'No,
I did it.' The guard then turned on him and said, 'Don't you know you're
not supposed to move things in a museum?' Duchamp smiled again and speaking
very softly said 'Well, I made the object - don't you think it's all right
for me to move it a little?'"(9)"
An interesting question, now, that the artist addressed to a presumably
puzzled museum attendant. Had Duchamp been allowed to refer to his nominal
and intellectual authorship in order to obtain the privilege of usage?
This question seems too good to spoil with an answer. It raises, however,
another, more general question that shall not remain unanswered.

What would be gained by the average visitor to an exhibition and his aesthetic experience,
if he too was allowed to set the wheel turning in an exhibition? As
far as I know, this was the case only once in the history of exhibiting
the various replicas. The touring exhibition "Art in Motion"
(Dutch: "Bewogen Beweging", Danish and Swedish: "Rörlse
i konsten"), stopping over in the Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam, the
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek,
from the spring of 1961 onwards, among other optical and kinetical works
of art put on display a replica of the Roue de Bicyclette, which,
based on the 1916 version, had been built by Ulf Linde and Per Olof
Ultvedt in May 1960. Pontus Hulten, at the time the Moderna's director,
assured me that the visitors to the exhibition had been allowed to turn
the wheel (10).
The spirit in those days, Hulten said, had simply been a different one
(11).
A different spirit? Surely, rather, it was due to the fact that the
replica, which had been built despite the lack of initial authorization,
was of a low financial value. In consequence the curators Hulten and
Sandberg could risk public use without having to fear too much damage
(12).

In order to return
to the question I raised earlier: little would be achieved if the visitor
was allowed to set the wheel turning. I will confine myself to giving
two reasons, one of them concerning the curational problem: the history
of the 20th century's participatory art shows that tactily involved
viewers were always either overstrained with the offer of participation
or unable to utilize the potential of the experience proposed to them.
Allan Kaprow reported, for instance, that the visitors to his situational
environment Push and Pull - A Furniture Commedy for Hans Hofmann
from 1963 did not react the way he had hoped they would to his proposal
to alter the furnishing. Robert Rauschenberg's Black Market, in which
the visitors were supposed to exchange objects and document this exchange
with a drawing, was ransacked in 1961 while on display in the exhibition
"Art in Motion" (13).
George Brecht had a similar experience when presenting his Cabinet made
in 1959 - a cabinet containing several everyday objects. The intended
epistemological experience, linked to the viewers' tactile participation,
was thwarted by overzealous customers looting the Cabinet(14).

At the opening of Roxys,
Edward Kienholz' legendary brothel environment, in the Alexander Iolas
Gallery in 1963, one of the visitors of the vernissage urinated into the
ash can of Cockeyed Jenny, one of the whore figure (15).
The second reason concerns the origin of the Bicycle Wheel itself:
it would be practically impossible for visitors to a spacious exhibition
to recreate the intimate atmosphere of the studio where Duchamp had once
been able to contemplate the movement of the wheel. It would be as if
one allowed the visitors of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna
to use, in an allegedly authentic manner, Benvenuto Cellini's Saliera
in order to emulate François Primeur, long since covered with dust,
at his sumptuous dining table. Historical events and situations may be
portrayed vividly in a museum, but it is impossible to recreate them.

Duchamp himself, however,
was once more given the opportunity to set the wheel turning, for in
1964 the Roue de Bicyclette's shift or rather the establishment
of its meaning entered its - for the time being - last stage. Duchamp
had authorized Arturo Schwarz to produce, amongst accurate replicas
of thirteen other works of art, an edition of the Bicycle Wheel,
the number of copies being eight plus two. The production of replicas
of the Roue which, in the fifties, amounted to only a few copies,
thereby gained a new quality and quantity. The strategy of creating
almost identical remades for the sake of representing the idea of the
ready-made inevitably had to result in authenticity, originality, in
the establishment of an aura and, finally, in artificiality. Every single
piece of the Schwarz-edition, just as before with the replicas produced
by Janis and Linde, had been affixed by Duchamp with the admonition
of metaphysics, the personal signature. Signatures commonly authenticate
the will of their absent author - unless they are forced from him, which
is hardly to be assumed in the case of Duchamp/Schwarz. Duchamp had
readily given his nominal placet to a definite authorization by signing
the 'documents' presented by Schwarz. And soon the Bicycle Wheels,
representing Duchamp's imagination, advanced triumphantly through the
international museums, thereby strengthening their museumesque status
as well.

Duchamp, in the sixties,
may have sat in New York and Neuilly, puffing away at his cigar and
turning the wheel that had been given to him as an artist's copy from
the Schwarz-edition. If so, then probably not without being amused by
the course of things. The way the multiple Bicycle Wheels are
displayed in the museums, however, was and still is traced out differently.
The visitor of a museum or a gallery is no longer confronted with a
"gadget" but with a remade representing the idea of the ready-made.
The ease with which it had once been possible for Duchamp to set the
wheel turning has been superseded by the complexity, the import, and
the historicization of the ready-made-concept. Had Marcel Duchamp originally
intended to create works that were not art, as he wrote in 1913 (16)
then the remades, on the other hand, bear witness to the affirmative
force of an institutionalized operating system of art. The turning wheel
of history has made the Bicycle Wheel an artefact. Reciprocally,
the latter has lost its drive.

8.
This is not only confirmed by the photographs documenting the mode of
presentation but also by an entry in the catalogue accompanying the
exhibition, where it says: "The 'readymades' are among the most
influential of Duchamp's works. They are ordinary objects that anyone
could have purchased at a hardware store [...]. The first readymade,
however, done in 1913 by fastening a bicycle wheel to a stool, was "assisted"
by Duchamp, and hence is an assemblage on the part of the discoverer
as well as the original manufacturer." (Catalogue The Museum of
Modern Art, New York: The Art of Assemblage. 2 October - 12 November
1961 (ed. by William C. Seitz) New York: The Museum of Modern Art and
Doubleday, 1961, p. 46.

9.
Marvin Lazarus, quoted from Gough-Cooper, Jennifer; Caumont, Jacques:
Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy 1887-1968.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1993, no page number (entry for 11 November
1961).

15.
see Virginia Dwan in Stuckey, Charles F.: Interview with Virginia Dwan
conducted by Charles F. Stuckey, 21 March 1984, The Oral History Collections
of the Archives of American Art, New York Study Center, p. 8.